The religious imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois

• Main Author: Kahn, Jonathon Samuel
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2003
• Subjects: American studies; Philosophy; Religion
• ISBN: 0496523813; 9780496523818

This dissertation examines W. E. B. Du Bois's uses of religious modalities—religious rhetoric, concepts, and typologies—in his writings, particularly the epoch-making The Souls of Black Folk. Scholars have long recognized that Du Bois was self-consciously agnostic and hostile toward denominational religion. Yet despite his lack of normative religious commitments, this dissertation shows that African American religious life furnishes Du Bois's writings with their distinctive moral vocabulary (“spiritual strivings,” “souls,” “sorrow songs,” and even “double consciousness”), major moral virtues (sacrifice and piety), and crucial narrative forms (the prophet's jeremiad and the parable of Christ's crucifixion in portraying African American lynchings) with which he criticizes and lays claim to American democracy. On the one hand, Du Bois was deeply critical of religious dogma and its effects on critical thought and conversation. On the other hand, Du Bois was unable to give voice and form to his personal and political aspirations without relying on religious archives. This dissertation recommends seeing Du Bois as an American pragmatist, in part, by virtue of this ambivalence about religion and its uses within pluralistic democracies. Pragmatists William James and George Santayana—both of whom Du Bois studied with—along with John Dewey represent a clerisy of religious naturalists for whom religion's value is not in its supernatural truths but in its worldly effects on its practitioners. This dissertation points out Du Bois's own pragmatic religious naturalism in crafting a religious orientation that eschews supernaturalism in ministering to the politics of race and racism. In this light, Souls, along with his sacrificial and jeremiadic discourses in his larger body of work, are all representations of his pragmatic religious naturalism. Further, through his trenchant religious social criticism, Du Bois gives pragmatism the political agency that critics claim it lacks. By pragmatically adapting religious resources for racial justice, Du Bois had a more powerful grasp on the socio-political implications of Jamesian thought than did the pragmatists themselves.